Congress

Troy Carter launches bid to run Congressional Black Caucus

Published

2 hours ago

September 23, 2026

Rep. Troy Carter (D-La.) launched a run to head the Congressional Black Caucus, making official his long-anticipated and heavily favored bid to take over the powerful group.

Carter announced his plans in a letter to colleagues sent Tuesday and obtained by Blue Light News, saying, “I will listen carefully. I will work hard. I will act when action is needed.”

Carter has support from much of the CBC and has positioned himself as a fierce ally of House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries.

Next term, the CBC is anticipating an influx of prospective ultraprogressive members. In his letter, Carter signaled he welcomes ideological diversity in the caucus.

“As Chair, I will respect the tremendous diversity of talent, experience, geography, ideology, and perspective within our Caucus,” Carter said in the letter. “Every Member should know that their voice matters, that they have a seat at the table, and that when they need their Caucus, their Caucus will be there.”

In a July interview with POLITICO, Carter previewed how he would lead the caucus, whose membership has been threatened by Republican-led redistricting in the South in the wake of an April Supreme Court decision in Louisiana v. Callais that limited the Voting Rights Act .

“If those who are out there banking on us being quieted, going away, not fighting for the rights of individuals, and providing resources to those that have been historically left behind, they are sadly mistaken,” he said at the time.

On other matters that the CBC will have to consider next term, he said he’s not keen on carving up majority-minority districts in blue states to create new Democratic seats, but he struck a softer note on seniority rights for committee assignments, saying: “I have never believed that a person that comes in with superior expertise in a subject matter should be told to wait.”

Congress

Sanders, Casar introduce ‘superintelligence’ ban

Published

1 hour ago

September 23, 2026

Blue Light Newsroom

Two top congressional progressives unveiled their bill Wednesday to ban artificial “superintelligence” and establish a Cabinet-level agency to regulate AI, fleshing out their plans for a crackdown on the industry.

Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) and Rep. Greg Casar (D-Texas) have advocated for heavy regulation of the rapidly evolving technology, particularly following a string of high-profile cyberattacks and doomsday warnings from industry insiders. Sanders and Casar teased the proposal earlier this month but only officially rolled out their “Ban Artificial Superintelligence Act” on Wednesday.

Casar said the bill would ban “recursive self-improvement,” meaning AI’s ability to build improved and more capable versions of itself. The bill also bars AI models from designing nuclear or biological weapons and would ban models that try to “escape human oversight or deceive humans,” Casar told reporters.

Sanders and Casar had previously outlined their plans to draft legislation banning “superintelligence” and to pause advanced AI development until a “Department of Artificial Intelligence” with a Senate-confirmed secretary is capable of monitoring model capabilities and identifying risks.

The legislation would set penalties for any entity that attempts to circumvent federal oversight, including the “corporate death penalty” for companies and up to 20 years in prison for individuals — on par with the punishment for illegally developing nuclear weapons.

The duo is bullish about both chambers swiftly taking up their legislation, even as Democratic leaders entertain much smaller-bore regulatory actions and some Republican leaders reject the need to advance AI safety legislation entirely. Casar said he believed the bill “will be considered the commonsense proposal in the coming weeks” as public pressure on Congress to enact AI guardrails mounts.

“In my view, we cannot simply sit by idly and wait for advanced AI to cause the next 9/11 or Chernobyl or a global pandemic or a financial crisis before we take action to protect the American people and, of course, the people of the world,” Sanders told reporters.

Congress

Senate Republican seeks to fast-track AI whistleblower bill

Published

2 hours ago

September 23, 2026

Blue Light Newsroom

Senate Judiciary Chair Chuck Grassley is trying to pass a bill before the midterms that would protect whistleblowers who disclose information about the risks involved in artificial intelligence development, according to two people granted anonymity to disclose nonpublic information.

The Iowa Republican is seeking to move it through unanimous consent — a way to expedite passage on the Senate floor that hinges on an agreement from all 100 senators to let the measure through.

Only one senator has to object in order to doom the effort. Grassley is in the process of privately checking with colleagues to see if someone will register opposition, according to the two people with knowledge of his efforts. He likely has until the end of this week to seal the deal, as senators are eager to begin their lengthy recess to campaign ahead of the November elections.

Even if someone indicates privately they oppose the bill, Grassley may go to the Senate floor and try to pass the bill anyways, one of the people said — a way to force a colleague to go on the record publicly blocking the measure and defend their position.

A longtime champion of whistleblower protections, Grassley introduced this specific legislation in May 2025. Original cosponsors included Republican Sens. Marsha Blackburn of Tennessee and Josh Hawley of Missouri, and Democratic Sens. Chris Coons of Delaware, Amy Klobuchar of Minnesota and Brian Schatz of Hawaii. Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer and Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand of New York, as well as Sen. Richard Blumenthal (D-Conn.), have more recently signed onto the bill.

The push for passage now comes as a flurry of current and former employees of leading AI labs have emerged to share alarm over the rapid pace of AI advancements and its potential for catastrophic consequences if left unchecked.

And while it wouldn’t come close to the kind of AI regulatory framework some lawmakers are clamoring for Congress to enact, it would represent a step toward bringing some accountability to AI development practices that some critics worry lacks necessary transparency.

Congress

Mike Lee could soon be in position to grant Trump a big Senate wish

Published

6 hours ago

September 23, 2026

Blue Light Newsroom

Donald Trump has long fumed over a Senate practice that lets Democrats effectively veto some of his judicial nominees. He might soon have an ally in a position to do something about it.

Utah Sen. Mike Lee is poised to chair the Judiciary Committee should Republicans manage to keep control of the Senate in the midterms. That would give the MAGA stalwart the power to decide the fate of the “blue slip,” which lets senators block any home-state district court judge, federal marshal or U.S. attorney nomination they oppose.

The decision risks pitting Lee against his Senate GOP colleagues, many of whom support the status quo. It also all but guarantees a public pressure campaign from Trump, with whom Lee has worked to ingratiate himself over the past two years.

Lee said in an interview that he didn’t expect to eliminate blue slips — actual pieces of paper senators sign to indicate their support for a nominee — but he left the door open to changing how the tradition is enforced.

“There is no appetite to just get rid of them,” Lee said before adding, “The blue slip itself has had a lot of evolution and it’s almost never static. Though it doesn’t mean that everything about the blue slip procedure will always be the same.”

Lee said it was “premature” to discuss in detail how he would approach the matter and noted it had undergone “iterative changes” as previous Judiciary chairs had “considered and in many many cases implemented [alterations] just in order to deal with things as they happen.”

Trump has a simpler view of the matter — demanding Senate Republicans completely ditch the blue slip, which he views as an intolerable fetter on his power to install federal judges. Current Judiciary Chair Chuck Grassley (R-Iowa) has repeatedly fended off Trump’s calls to end the practice, explaining that most of his fellow senators have no interest in giving up leverage in who gets home-state appointments.

Asked how the White House would want Lee to handle blue slips, a spokesperson pointed back to several of the president’s comments over the past year, including an October 2025 Truth Social post where he called it an “old and ridiculous custom.” Trump targeted Grassley directly last December, saying that it was “shocking” that he would allow “this scam to continue.”

More recently, Trump lamented the “ridiculous views of Republicans on blue slipping” when he temporarily backed off Jay Clayton’s director of national intelligence nomination, which derailed a bipartisan surveillance deal. Clayton himself had previously been caught in a blue slip fight after Trump nominated him as U.S. attorney in Manhattan, and Trump feared a repeat.

While Senate colleagues widely expect Lee to face the same pressure from Trump that Grassley has endured, several Republicans indicated in interviews they hope Lee sticks to precedent.

“I think, you know, he’s a traditionalist, and I think he’ll honor the blue slip,” said Sen. John Cornyn (R-Texas), a longtime Judiciary Committee member who is leaving the Senate at the start of next year.

For one thing, Lee is likely to face immense peer pressure. While Lee could unilaterally scrap or modify the blue slip precedent as Judiciary chair, he’d risk angering some fellow Republicans who want to keep control of nominations in their back yards — including under future Democratic administrations.

“Senators have few prerogatives and tools, and that’s one of them,” Cornyn said.

Lee also confronts the prospect that, in a thin GOP majority, a small number of fellow Republican senators could hem him in by pledging to oppose any nominees that do not have home-state-senator support.

Grassley nodded to that reality amid Trump’s pressure last year, posting on X that “a U.S. Atty/district judge nominee without a blue slip does not [have] the votes to get confirmed on the Senate floor & they don’t [have] the votes to get out of [committee].”

Sen. John Kennedy (R-La.), a member of the Judiciary Committee, said he would vote in committee and on the floor to preserve the blue slips.

“I know who is qualified in my state to be a federal judge a lot better than somebody in Washington, D.C., does,” Kennedy said, predicting that Republicans would be able to “outvote” Lee were he to move to eliminate them.

With the GOP unlikely in the next Congress to maintain the three-vote cushion it now enjoys, Lee would need to convince potentially every Republican on the Judiciary Committee — and nearly every Republican in the chamber — to back him up.

That could be difficult, given the strong support within the Republican conference for keeping the blue slip as is, according to two GOP aides granted anonymity to discuss internal dynamics. Lee’s emerging role will also require him to win over many of the same colleagues he has alienated over the past year with his advocacy for a partisan elections bill that has no clear path to passage.

Senate Majority Leader John Thune said late last year that there are “way more Republican senators who are interested in preserving” the blue slip “that those who aren’t.”

“I have to assume everybody supports the blue slip,” Grassley said in an interview Tuesday, voicing his support for keeping it as-is.

“A president of the United States can’t know exactly what is going on in those individual states, and you need to guarantee senator input for marshals, U.S. attorneys, and district judges,” he said.

That said, Lee is correct that the blue-slip precedent has already been eroded: Republicans effectively ended the practice for circuit judges during Trump’s first term, arguing at the time that courts of appeals cover broad regions and thus shouldn’t be subject to veto by a single state’s senator.

Lee said amid that debate in a 2018 Judiciary Committee hearing that the blue slip “is not, and never has been, codified as a rule.”

“Its use as a de facto veto has definitely been the exception rather than the rule,” Lee said.

During his second term, Trump has erupted over instances where Democrats have used the blue slip to block — or at least complicate — the confirmations of his favored nominees.

Schumer and fellow New York Democratic Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand refused to greenlight Clayton’s U.S. attorney nomination; he was later appointed to the job by Manhattan’s federal judges.

But New Jersey Sens. Cory Booker and Andy Kim successfully blocked the nomination of Alina Habba to become their state’s permanent U.S. attorney last year, and Trump’s pick for U.S. attorney in Southern California, Bill Essayli, was also sidelined due to Democratic opposition.

Sen. Dick Durbin of Illinois, the top Judiciary Democrat and a prior chair of the committee, said that he was largely in the dark about Lee’s views on the blue slip but urged the Utah Republican to “think twice” before undoing it.

“I stuck with it through thick and thin,” Durbin said. “A lot of people who criticized me as chairman for observing it thanked me after we lost the majority. … So I hope he sticks with it.”